“They were less embarrassed than I was”: Emilio Estevez held the door open for viewers walking out of his movie mid-screening
It can’t be a nice feeling for an actor or filmmaker to be sitting in for the premiere of their latest movie when audience members decide they’ve had enough and start walking out, but it got even worse for Emilio Estevez.
Even if the creative team knows they’ve made a shit film, it’s still got to sting knowing that audiences feel the exact same way, and actively hate it so much that they can’t even bring themselves to stay until the credits start rolling, which is enough by itself to cause palpable embarrassment.
And yet, for whatever reason, Estevez made things significantly worse for himself when he opted to act as an impromptu doorman, holding the door open so that punters could gracefully exit the theatre, which sounds like the most awkward thing in the world.
Do you make eye contact? Do you not make eye contact? Do you thank him for holding the door open, as is the custom, even though you’re fucking off midway through a movie that he directed and starred in? It’s a moral conundrum that nobody would ever expect to find themselves in, not least an actor and filmmaker.
In the emptying audience’s defence, though, what the fuck was Rated X doing premiering at the Sundance Film Festival? Robert Redford’s brainchild was created to spotlight emerging talents and independent cinema, and a made-for-television feature starring Estevez and his brother, Charlie Sheen, as porno and strip club entrepreneurs Artie and Jim Mitchell didn’t quite fit the bill.
To offer an indication of the ingenuity behind 2000’s Rated X, the tagline for the picture, which was about two siblings who made their wealth through sleaze, was ‘They put the ‘X’ in Sex’. Somebody in marketing must have been really proud of themselves when they came up with that one.
Needless to say, the Sundance crowd wasn’t impressed by the Estevez/Sheen combination, leading to a cringe-inducing act of politeness from the director. “I was at the premiere of Rated X at Sundance, and I stood in the back of the theatre after introducing the film,” he recalled. “I held the door open for people who were walking out.”
“They didn’t recognise me until they got right next to me,” he added. “They were certainly less embarrassed than I was for holding the door open for them to leave.” Can you imagine? Audiences are entitled to walk out of whatever they see fit, but very rarely has it ever gone down like that.
You’re watching a terrible Emilio Estevez movie, one that’s so bad you can’t stomach it anymore, only to realise when you’re walking out that the guy holding the door is, in fact, Emilio Estevez, and it’s completely debatable which party should have had the redder face.
